Panoramic photography, the taking of a photograph or photographs covering an elongated field of view, has a long history in photography. Perhaps the most primitive method of panoramic photography is the taking of several adjoining photos with a conventional camera and then mounting the prints together in alignment to achieve a complete panorama. Modern techniques adapt this method by using digital cameras to capture the images, and then using computer image processing techniques to align the images for printing as a single panorama.
The continuous development of digital camera technologies along with constantly increasing speed and processing power of computers have laid the foundation for digital imaging systems that are capable of acquiring image data for the automatic creation of wide to entire 360° panoramas, including both still panoramic images and dynamic panoramic movies.
When shooting images or movies of outdoor activities, especially when using a hand-held (e.g., a smartphone) or wearable video camera in outdoor situations, the instability of the user can easily cause severe shaking of the camera and thus blurring in the output still or video images and as a result, seriously affecting the viewing experience. Existing techniques and systems provide camera and image stabilization during the image or video capture process, for example, by stabilizing the camera lens using a group of sensors to detect camera shake and a group of motors to move the lens to counter the shake. However, these mechanical stabilization techniques would often take a moment to detect the shake and stabilize the image. In applications where high speeds and high frame rates are needed, the slow speed of the mechanical stabilization operations can severely limit the functionality of the cameras. Moreover, in panoramic imaging systems which use multiple cameras, having multiple sets of motors to independently stabilize multiple cameras can be an extremely expensive approach.